LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 785 782 



HoUinger 

pH8.5 

Mill Run F3.1955 



^ 687 
.P83 

Copy I 






^ %utxon in its ^lyrruw. 



^^atioit in its^oxxow: 

TWO SERMONS 

PREACHED IN GRACE CHURCH, 

New York, 



HENRY C?'POTTER, D.D. 



PRINTED BY REQUEST. 



New York : 

THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

2 and 3 Bible House. 

1881. 



e^^ 






5? 



? 



Some Lights and Shadows 



THE PRAYER DAY 



PRESIDENT. 



(Preached Sutiday Morning, Sep/. J llh, i88l.) 



Ih that planUd the ear, shall He not hear ? or He that made the eye, sha'l 
He not see? — Psalm xciv, 9 (Psaltek.) 

There are two ideas of God, which are held to-day 
"by thinking men of different minds, with equal sin- 
cerity and tenacity. 

The one regards Him as a Force or Power, behind 
nature, in which it takes its rise or finds its origin. 
The school which admits nothing that it camot 
■demonstrate has not thus far, if we are to believe its 
most candid teachers, succeeded in demonstrating 
that life is self-evolved, and since this cannot be 
■demonstrated, it is not unwilling to admit that there 
may be, somewhere, some Force which, for want of 
a better name, may be called God, and in which 
man as we know him, and things as we see them, 
take their rise. But the most that it is willing t^ 
admit concerning this Force or Power, is that it is 
a Force or Power that "makes for righteousn3S3," 
an influence — a tendency — a law, if you please, th^ 
result of whose operations is in the direction of good 
rather than evil. That this influence, or tendency, 
or force, is a Personal Being — that it is affected by 
our api^eals to it — that it hears a request which we 
make to it, or answers what we call our prayers, this 
it explicitly denies. 

And it does so for two reasons : first, that if God 
be such a Being as it understands him to be, he can- 



6 

not answer prayer, and then, tliat as a matter of ex- 
perience, He does not. If, in other words, God be- 
simply another name for law, then it is not of the 
nature of law to operate by mere caprice. Bvit that 
would be caprice, and not law, which should effect 
one thing to-day from its own impulse, and another 
to-morrow because somebody asked it to. In fact, 
however, this impersonal theory of God is best of 
all demonstrated (its disciples maintain) by expe- 
rience, since experience furnishes no consistent argu- 
ment for believing in a personal God who hears and 
answers prayer. Observe that the phrase is " no 
consistent argument ; " since the disciple of an im- 
personal Force or Power, as being all that we know 
as God, does not deny that there are coincidences 
between men's prayers and subsequent events, such 
as look like an answer, on the part of the Being to 
wliom those prayers were addressed, to their re- 
quests. But these he explains by maintaining that 
they are no more than coincidences, and that they 
are offset by innumerable instances where prayer 
has been persistently and utterly disregarded. Ships 
have gone down in mid-ocean, and men have cried 
to God for succor as they never cried before. But, 
as with the priests of Baal crying for hours together 
to their God, " O Baal hear us ! " so here, there 
was " no voice, nor any that answered, nor any that 
regarded." Good men have prayed, and prayed for 
reasonable things. A parent has asked for his boy,, 
not wealth, nor eminence, nor cleverness, but only a 
sanctified character, and has seen him go down, 
smitten and accursed, into a drunkard's grave. A 
widow has cried to heaven, not for ease or luxury. 



but only for her daily bread, and lias been hastened 
to a premature grave by the employer who starved 
and robbed, because he could not corrupt her. The 
heavens have seemed as brass to sufferers who lifted 
thitherward their prayer and have seemed to get no 
answer back. " Let us have done, then," says the stu- 
dents of all these things, " with your dogma of a Per- 
sonal God, and most of all with the notion that He 
does anything in this world because any man or 
woman asks Him to." 

And yet, that other school to which I began by re- 
ferring, will not have done with such a notion, nor 
refrain from acting upon it. There are hours in ev- 
ery one's life when prayer seems almost a mockery, 
and God almost a myth. And at such times the argu- 
ments against both which I have referred to, seem 
potent, if not conclusive. But there are other hours 
and other eras, when the conviction of a man or a 
nation is a very different one. And this is not be- 
cause at such a time one can tabulate statistics which 
demonstrate God's disposition to be influenced by 
men's prayers, nor because the difficulty of answer- 
ing a great many prayers in the way that a great 
many people expect them to be answered is not seen 
and recognized. But at such times such persons re- 
member this : that if it be granted that man is a 
creature of imperfect knowledge — that he is apt to 
want a great many things that are not good for him, 
and that he is apt to want things that are good for 
him, selfishly, and without regard to the welfare of 
other people— if it be still further true that, in the 
case of a child who comes with his petition to you, 
you serve him best, oftentimes, by denying, rather 



8 

tlian by granting his request, then, certainly, nothing 
is proved as against prayer by insisting that, in cer- 
tain emergencies, certain requests were denied in- 
stead of being granted. Said a missionary bishop 
once, " Soon after I went to my missionary jurisdic- 
tion, I wanted twenty thousand dollars, with which 
to build five cheap churches in as many growing 
towns. Oh, how I prayed and prayed for it, but, thank 
God, it never came ! Yes, thank God ; for in six 
months the population of these five mining towns 
had moved away, and then I saw that if I had had it 
the money would have been simply wasted by me, 
and that God knew better than I did." 

And in that plain and homely sentence there is the 
essence of the whole matter. " God knew better" than 
the bishop did. Do you supjDose he stopped pray- 
ing, this missionary bishop, because he did not get 
his twenty thousand dollars? No, his faith went 
down a great deal deeper than that ! He believed 
first that God knew — that is, that He took account 
of what His servant was doing for His truth out in 
those mining towns, and was interested in it. And 
it is that conviction, far more than any visible or 
particular answer to prayer, which has been the 
spring of it ever since the world began. There are 
men, as I have said, who believe that God is a mere 
force, or law, or soulless tendency. But there are 
other men who believe that He is a living Father, 
and the strongest argument for that faith they find, 
after all, in themselves. There is no more magnificent 
statement of that argument than we find in the 94tli 
Psalm. It was written in a time of cruel oppres- 
sion, when wickedness stalked unabashed in high 



places, and when the earlier fear of God had died 
•out from the breasts of even the rulers of Israel 
themselves. There were men who ought to have 
protected the weak, who used their power to outrage 
them. And so David cries out, telling up this in- 
famy to God, " They smite down thy people, O Lord, 
and trouble thine heritage. They murder the widow 
and the stranger, and put the fatherless to death. 
And yet they say, ' Tush, the Lord shall not see, 
neither shall the God of Jacob regard it.' " And then 
comes that swift reply, which, as Herder has said, 
is as pertinent to the faithless philosophy of our 
own day as of David's day, " O, ye fools, when will 
je understand ? He that j^lanted the ear, shall He 
not hear ? and He that made the eye, shall He not 
see ?" You have in yourselves a power that sees and 
hears. Where did you get it ? AVhat does it imply, 
if not that, somewhere, there is One who hears with 
an unerring ear, and sees with an all-searching eye ? 
Be sure that whatever comes to pass here in the 
world, there is one Being who sees and knows it all, 
and who is no indifferent spectator of the wrongs and 
sorrows of His. children. Do not forget Him, or 
leave him out of account ; but rather remind your- 
self how your own nature is at once the image and 
witness of His. You see and hear. Be sure that He, 
whose child you are, sees and hears you ! 

It is that larger truth which is implied in these 
words of David's, of which we have lately been hav- 
ing such interesting evidence in connection with our 
stricken and suffering President. A great calamity, 
with elements in it which furnish motives for abund- 
ant self-scrutiny and mortification has brought this 



10 

people to its knees with an earnestness and una- 
nimity which are wholly without a parallel. These 
last seventy days have been an era of tender sympa- 
thy and earnest prayer which will always be memo- 
rable and precious. And both these characteristics 
are to me an evidence for the being and character of 
Him who, as I am profoundly persuaded, has in- 
spired them. 

(a.) Look, for instance, at the tokens of universal 
sympathy. I do not know how it may have been 
with most of us, but I think there is more than one 
here who must own that he could hardly read that 
story of the journey of the President from the capi- 
tal to the seaside without a sob in the voice and a 
mist in the eye. That long lane of watchers stretch- 
ing two hundred miles, that lined the way by which 
he journeyed, silent, bareheaded, tearful. The 
woman who stood in the station at Wilmington (was 
it ?) with her babe at her breast, straining her eyes 
for one glimpse of that stricken son of another and 
more aged mother, and who, when her child cried, 
turned instantly away, and, without a word, vanished 
out of sight and hearing, lest even her child's cry 
should disturb the sufferer — the little fellow at 
Elberon, who asked permission to drive one spike 
in the temporary track, that so he too might share 
the privilege of smoothing the way for the nation's 
patient — -the cottager who, when the foreman of that- 
same track-laying company said to him, " Sir, I fear 
we shall have to carry the track through yonder 
flower-bed," answered quickly, " Carry it through the 
house if it will better serve the President " — these 
are but one or two of uncounted and countless evi- 



11 

dences of a sympatliy so tender, a generosity so eager, 
a gracious and beautiful unselfishness which gives 
one a new faith in humanity and makes him prouder 
of his kind. 

(b.) But there has been more than sympathy — 
there has been earnest and almost universal prayer. 
Dear brethren, how are we to explain it ? In a mo- 
ment of panic on shipboard, in an earthquake, in the 
presence of any sudden and appalling calamity, men 
will fling themselves upon their knees, and cry out 
in an ecstasy of panic and terror. And under such 
circumstances, we would hardly maintain that their 
conduct was evidence of their faith in God, or in the 
power of prayer. Such an act, we might rightly sa}-, 
would be apt to be more the fi"uit of a blind fear 
than of sound reason. 

But in the case of the country it has been difi"er- 
ent. There has been no panic and no sudden danger 
to individuals or the nation. If the President were 
to die to-morrow, there is no one of us who believes 
that the government would go on otherwise than in 
an orderly and peaceful way, without the smallest 
peril to any single citizen. And yet, in spite of this 
absence of panic, there has been a steadily grow- 
ing impulse and tendency toward prayer. These 
seventy da3's that have come and gone have not 
weakened, they have deepened it, and men who have 
not said a prayer for twenty years, have been seen, 
during the past week, in the House of God, and on 
their knees. 

Surely the meaning of all this is not hard to see. 
Our own sympathies, b}- a combination of circum- 
stances unusual and most impressive, have been ap- 



12 

pealed to in a very marked and singular way. The 
patient and manly sufferer, the aged mother, the 
heroic wife, whose fine fibre, tense as steel and stead- 
fast as a star, is the stuff of which gi'eat nations are 
made — these have combined to elicit a feeling which 
has been a glory and beauty to the people in whom 
it has found expression. And what is it that has 
followed upon this sympathy? A steadily deepening 
conviction of God's sympathy. Men and women 
have argued fi'om their own softened hearts up to 
God's heart. They have said, "If we feel in this 
way, how must God feel ? We have a thousand 
things to make us hard and selfish and indifferent, 
that cannot possibly affect Him. And if we are so 
drawn together and softened by this common sorrow, 
surely it must make its appeal to Him, and just 
because He is our Father, and the President's 
Pather, and the Father of that vast army of suf- 
ferers of whom, after all, we must not forget the 
President is not the chief, He cannot and will not 
be indifferent." 

What is there now which follows inevitably from 
this ? Keep in mind all along here, that, in accor 1- 
ance with the spirit of those words of David with 
which we began, we are arguing from our own nature 
up to God's. He must have a heart of sympathy, 
we say, because our natures are an image of His, 
and because, deep in even the most selfish human 
nature there are some possibilities of sympathy. 
Yes, and there is more. There is an instinct of gen- 
erous response when our sympathies are appealed 
to. There is that — and we know perfectly well that 
it is the best and noblest element in our nature — 



13 

which, when another asks help of us, prompts us to 
give it ; which, that is to say, when another jDrays to 
us, prompts us to hear his prayer, and to grant it, if 
we can. But He that made the ear, with which we 
hear another's prayer, can He not hear that prayer 
when it is addressed to Him ? And He that made 
the eye, with which we see another's sorrow, and feel 
for it, cannot He, too, see that sorrow, and feel for it 
with an infinitely greater tenderness ? 

It is thus that those deeper instincts of the human 
heart, which witness to the Fatherhood of God and 
His sympathy with His children, are, as I read them, 
a stronger argument for prayer than any other. We 
may stumble amid the seeming contradictions be- 
tween prayer and natural laws, or between a predes- 
tinating Providence and the soul's personal cry ; but 
wider than all of them — nay, all-inclusive, and all- 
encompassing — is the mighty heart of God, to whose 
paternal consciousness all these seeming contradic- 
tions now appear, even as one day, it may be, they 
will appear to us, the veriest dreams of a disordered 
imagination. 

And so let us thank God that He has given us, in 
our own natures, this witness of our right to pray to 
Him. As we hear, so the soul tells us in our doubt- 
ing moments, does He who made that with which we 
hear, no less hearken and listen Himself. There are 
moments when, in some darkness, some secret, un- 
shared trouble, you cannot speak to any one else. 
Do not forget, then, to speak to Him. Remember 
that you are His child, and refuse to live as if you 
were only a dumb and voiceless brute. 



14 

"For what are men better than sheep or goats, 
That nourish a blind life in the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer. 
Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? 
For so, the whole round world is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God ! " 

So has wisely sung a voice which finds an echo in 
uncounted hearts. And the words suggest one other 
fact which must needs chasten our thankfulness in 
that evidence of a nation's faith in the power of 
prayer which has lately in so many waj^s been 
given to us. Unless our experience in this commu- 
nity has been exceptional, the observance of last 
Thursday was conspicuous by the absence of the one 
class which, of all others, is the most numerous 
among us. I mean the working class. Banks and 
shops and offices were closed, but so far as one could 
see, the day-laborer went as usual to his toil, and 
nothing was done to make it easier for him to find 
his way into the house of God, or to give him a 
chance to pray after he had done so. I do not un- 
dertake to say whose fault this is, but one thing 
greatly needs to be said, and that is, that no theory 
of social ethics is a sound one which keeps prayer, 
or opportunities for prayer, as the privilege of any 
one class or caste in the community. If Ave cannot 
stop building and loading and unloading and plow- 
ing and reaping and digging, long enough both to 
pray ourselves and let our ioUliu) feVoio man kneel 
doivn heskle us dso, then we had better not build or dig 
at all. Our foundations will be but sand, no matter 
how deep down we sink them. A nation which'keeps 
religion or the offices of religion for any one part 



15 

of its people to the neglect of the rest, has begun 
to declare that it does not believe in God at all. 
For if it did, then it would remember that any sys- 
tem of religion which leaves out his neediest and 
most dependent children, is at once a mockery and 
a sham. " The poor crieth and the Lord heareth 
him," is a promise which, as I remember it, is not 
made in any such general and unqualified terms to 
either the rich, the clever, or the respectable ! 

See to it then, I beseech you, just in so far as your 
own lot is easier or more privileged than any other, 
you guard the rights of that other to commune with 
his Maker and His Saviour. Help other men and 
Avomen to pray — the servants who serve you, the 
laborer who toils for you, the outcast whose soul no 
man cares for, though philanthropy may feed his 
body — by keeping sacred for these some hours of ap- 
proach to (jrod. In their interests, as well as in your 
own, guard Sunday from the hands that, upon what- 
soever pretense, would make it no different from any 
other day. You want and they want, believe me, to 
be drawn near^er to their unseen Father. These are 
prosperous times they tell us ; but oh, what sorrow 
there must be in human homes when life is held so 
cheaply, and when men and women who have not 
the heart to face their cheerless future are ending it 
so soon and so awfully. What must they think — 
these poor, benighted ones, of the Father who is over 
them ? Do they believe in Him at all ? Do they 
care to find Him and to be helped by Him ? And 
yet, in all their blind groping and stumbling and 
falling, they are your brothers and sisters, and 
mine, and He who prayed for them from His cross is 
praying for them still. 



16 

Be it ours to pray for them no less. There are 
clouds about our own pathway, it may be, that do 
not break or lift. We have prayed for light, and yet 
it has not come. Let us think, now and then, if it be 
so of those whose way is darker even than our own. 
Let us learn not only to pray, but to pray unselfishly 
for them ; for so— I know not by what strange alchemy 
it is, but, believe me, it is true — so shall we often 
find our own doubts hushed, our own fears dispelled,, 
and our darkness turning into day. Forgetting our- 
selves for a little in thought and prayer for others, 
we shall find that He whose name is Love has not 
forgotten us ! 



OUR 



DEAD PRESIDENT, 



(Preached Sunday Morning, Sept. 2j/h, i88l. ) 



Blessed art ihou, land, lohen th;/ klnj is the son of nobles /-Ecclesi- 

ASTES X, 17. 

It is a king himself who writes these words, and 
whose ancestry, only a single step backwards, found 
its root in a royalty no nobler nor more imperial 
than a shepherd's boy. For Solomon is the preacher 
here, and the father of Solomon was David, the 
shepherd lad of Bethlehem. ^ ■, -, 

And so, when he writes, " Blessed art thou, O land, 
when thy king is the son of nobles," we know that m 
his thought there is something more and greater than 
the mere nobility of rank, or the titled eminence that 
comes with ancient and lofty lineage. Such a Ime- 
a-e is not without its blessings, and it is only a preju- 
diced and unintelligent judgment that can despise 
its value. If we believe that a pure strain, that cour- 
age and endurance and a kindly disposition may be 
passed on by a horse or a dog, it is a stupid and 
unreflecting radicalism that despises the same prin- 
ciple when it is applied to men. To be born o 
noble and kingly parentage ought to carry with it 
something of the instincts of nobility, even if always 
it does not ; and we Eepublicans do not need to dis- 
parage a princely lineage, even though in dispensing 
once for all with kings and princes and nobles and 
the privileges of inherited rank, we have found, as we 
believe, " a wiser and more excellent way. 



20 

But while this is true, it is, as I have implied, of no- 
bility in some larger and loftier sense that Solomon 
is speaking here. Behind all character there are en- 
during principles, and it is by these principles, hand- 
ed on often from sire to son, but developed for the 
first time sometimes by him in whom they are illus- 
trated, that greatness is nurtured, and the truest 
kingship achieved. We see, now and then, men of 
the humblest lineage, as the world reckons such 
things, who mount to the loftiest eminence from low- 
liest and most obscure beginnings, and we see all 
along, in the history of such men, certain dominant 
aspirations, certain clear convictions, a faith and 
courage and majesty of rectitude which rule and 
mould them from the beginning. Such men, what- 
ever their origin, seem to be born of great truths 
and nurtured by grand ideas. In the womb of these 
their intellects were nourished, their wills disciplined, 
and their consciences enlightened. If we go back to 
the mothers who bore them, no matter in what hum- 
ble station they lived and toiled and nourished their 
little ones, the same noble qualities appear, and 
these are the influences that rule and mould the man. 
Such a man, in whatever high station he stands, is 
great and noble, because he is, most of all, the son 
of noble beliefs and noble convictions. 

It is such a man that this nation mourns to-day, 
and whose memory we honor, not merely or only be- 
cause he was President, but because kinglier than 
his official position, more royal than his ancestry or 
lineage, noble and heroic as is the mother who bore 
him, was the man himself. And of him I would 
speak this morning, not so much in a strain of grief 



21 

or with the thought of our common bereavement, as 
in thankfulness to the Providence who gave him to 
us, and in gratitude for the benediction of his exam- 
ple. With a wise appropriateness the Church and 
the State unite in calling us to-morrow to a day of 
humiliation and fasting and prayer. Our past as a 
nation is not so stainless that we do not need to hum- 
ble ourselves. Our present is not so cloudless or so 
aspiring that we do not need both to discipline and 
ennoble it by fasting. Our future is not so secure 
that we may not wisely and earnestly pray for a loftier 
guidance and a more unerring wisdom than our own. 
Bat, meantime, the life and work of our dead Presi- 
dent are completed, and as the nation watches round 
his bier, every citizen in it of kin to him who is gone 
in this comipon grief of ours, and every man, woman, 
and child a mourner, let us gather the lessons of a 
royal life, and bless God to-day that our dead king 
was the son of nobles. 

Happily, our theme for these few moments is 
bounded and circumscribed by this place and this 
hour. It is not mine to speak of Mr. Garfield as a 
teacher, a man of letters, a soldier, or a statesman. 
Nor am I called to sketch the romance of his swift 
and sure ascent, with no step backward in it all, 
from the tow-path to the White House. These are 
aspects of his history which will get abundant recog- 
nition elsewhere, and which are in no danger of being 
lost sight of in the eulogy of the forum or the pages 
of books and newspapers. But, howsoever worthy of 
commemoration they may be, and most surely they 
belong to the history of our time, and of this people, 
they are largely foreign to those interests and truths 



22 

for which the pulpit exists to witness, and with 
which it should chiefly be concerned. In this place, 
at any rate, it is of moment to ask, not how high a 
man climbed, nor from whence ; not how many offices 
he held, nor how soon he grasped them ; not even 
how much learning adorned him, nor how gracefully 
he used it ; but behind and within all this scaffold- 
ing of outward activities, how grew the man himself? 
What of his character in its inmost fibre and quality 
— not what did he do ? but what did he come to be, 
and how ? What of the Godward side of the man — 
that side of every man which was made to reach out 
and up — his moral nature, his faith in the unseen ; 
his wealth in that kind of character which, when we 
come to open the pages of the New Testament, seems 
oftenest to confront us there. It is of these aspects 
of the life and work of our dead President of which 
I would speak to-day. In other words, I would re- 
call this morning, and this morning bless God for, 
his good example : (a), of fidelity ; (b), of manly 
Christian faith ; and then (c), of Christian heroism 
and patience. 

(a.) Says the great apostle to the Gentiles, writing 
to the Church at Corinth : " It is required in stewards 
that a man be found faithful," and when St. John 
is gathering up for our instruction those wonderful 
echoes of the Apocalyptic vision which came to him 
on Patmos, he is bidden to write : " Be thou faithful 
unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." 
What a faithful life it was that breathed itself out at 
Elberon last Monday ! That story of the orphan lad 
fighting his way through every difficulty — first to an 
education and then to eminence in three distinct 



23 

Tocations — teacher, soldier, statesman — and genuine- 
ly great in all of tliem, what is there in it that so 
much enlists us as its fidelity ? There are men who 
advance to eminence, borne on from the outset by 
gifts of genius and force of will, which make distinc- 
tion inevitable. But the ruler whom we have lost 
was in no sense a man of genius, and had a nature 
as gentle and considerate as a woman's. He did not 
climb up simply by thrusting others down, and he 
did not achieve without the strain and toil of brave 
and faithful endeavor. In a sketch of him from the 
pen of an Englishman, there occurs an incident 
which, until I read it there, was new to me, and 
which I venture to recall here, though to some of 
you it may be familiar, because it illustrates so aptly 
this special quality of General Garfield's habitual 
fidelity: 

At an early period in our late war, the State of 
Kentucky was threatened with invasion by a large 
body of Confederate troops, who had, in fact, some 
5,000 of them, already crossed its eastern border. 
In December, Colonel Garfield (as he then was) was 
ordered to report himself and his regiment to Gen- 
eral Buell, at Louisville. The historian of the 
Forty-second Regiment relates his interview with 
Buell and the result : — In the evening Colonel Gar- 
field reached Louisville and sought General Buell at 
his headquarters. He found a cold, silent, austere 
man, who asked a few direct questions, revealed 
nothing, and eyed the new-comer with a curious, 
searching expression, as though trying to look into 
the untried Colonel and see whether he would suc- 
ceed or fail. Taking a map. General Buell pointed 



24 

oiit the position of Marshall's forces in Eastern 
Kentucky, marked the locations in which the Union 
troops in that district were posted, explained the 
nature of the country, and then dismissed his visitor 
with this remark : " If you were in command of the 
sub-department of Eastern Kentucky, what would 
you do ? Come here to-morrow at nine o'clock, and 
tell me." Colonel Garfield returned to his hotel, 
procured a map of Kentucky, the last Census Report, 
paper, pen and ink, and sat down to his task. He 
stiidied the roads, resources and population of every 
county in Eastern Kentucky. At daylight he was 
still at work, and had been at work all night, but at 
nine o'clock in the morning he was at headquarters 
with a sketch of his plans. Having read the paper 
carefully, General Buell made it the basis of an im- 
mediate order, placing Garfield in command of a 
brigade of four regiments of infantry and a battalion 
of cavalry, and ordered him to Eastern Kentucky to 
expel Marshall's force in his own way. The result 
of this appointment was the battle of Mill Creek, 
the first victory gained by the Union troops in that 
part of the country, and this by men inferior in 
numbers to the troops to whom they were opposed, 
and who had never before been under fire. 

The significance of such an incident as this is 
larger than at first appears. It is the eternal law 
that he who has been faithful over a few things 
shall be made ruler over many things ; and it was 
here the fidelity in the immediate task which opened 
the way for those larger honors and responsibilities 
that lay beyond it. To do that task well, nay, best — 
not to slight it, nor to shirk it — to turn on the 



25 

problem given him to solve every light at his com- 
mand, and then to sit up all night working at its 
solution, this revealed a manhood whose strongest 
instinct — nay, whose settled habit had come to be 
fidelit}'. Think back, now, along the earlier history 
of the young soldier (for he Avas then scarce thirty 
years of age), and remember by what earlier fidelity 
that habit had been strengthened and disciplined. 
To do his duty, and to do it with his whole heart, 
this seems to have been the eager purpose of boy 
and man alike. 

And so it came to pass that other men trusted and 
leaned upon him. He never addressed himself to 
any question without doing his best to master it, 
and the thoroughness with which he wrought has 
been one of his characteristics which has, I think, 
been but partially and imperfectly appreciated. He 
was not an elegant scholar, and little inaccuracies of 
his in a Latin quotation, for instance, have led some 
of us to smile at the claim which others made for 
him of eminent culture. But he had something bet- 
ter than the learning of mere technical accuracy or 
literary nicety : he had the learning which reveals 
that a man has mastered what he is talking about. 
His financial speeches are a striking illustration 
of this, disclosing a knowledge of the history of 
finance in older nations, which is equally rare and 
valuable. But he only got this, as alone he got 
other things, by digging for them. He had a ready 
command of words, but they were worth listening to, 
because he had packed into them the result of long- 
continued and painstaking assiduity. And hence it 
was that honors sought him, and larger burdens 



26 

were given him to bear. It did not matter what task 
was assigned to him ; no sooner was he called to it 
than it became a trust, and he himself a steward who 
must give account. 

I take it, this is the practical difference between 
those who do the work of life and those who fail 
to do it. Make ever}^ allowance that utmost charity 
can claim for feeble powers and narrow brains and 
broken health and inherited disabilities, and the 
fact remains that the world divides itself into the 
faithful and the faithless — those who face their 
work and those who evade it. And so, at last, when 
the account is made up and the verdict pronounced, 
it runs, not " Well done, good and" — not good-na- 
tured, or eloquent, or well-meaning, but " Well 
done, good &udjait/i/ul servant." 

(b.) In President Garfield this fidelity was united to 
— ought I not rather to say it was rooted in — a manly 
and courageous Christian faith. A manly and cour- 
ageous Christian faith, I say, for there were features in 
the religious life of our late Chief Magistrate which 
were in many respects exceptional. It is not un- 
common for public men to be, at any rate, nominal 
Christians, and to indicate their belief by at least 
acquiescence in Christian usages and traditions. 
But in General Garfield there was something more 
than acquiescence in something more than a tradi- 
tion. He belonged to a communion whose name 
was by the great majority of j^eople unknown until 
they heard it in connection with him, and whose 
tenets and fellowship were alike obscure. It was a 
communion utterly without prestige either of num- 
bers, wealth or influence. A man may be proud to be 



27 

of the Methodists or Baptists, because they are so nu- 
Tnerous, or to be of the Presbyterians, because they 
are so orthodox and respectable, or to be a Church- 
man, because it is so historic, or a Unitarian, be- 
cause they are so clever ; but to be a member of that 
little and obscure sect that called itself the Church 
of the Disciples, Avith its brief history and simple 
rites, and meagre and homely brotherhood, there 
ivas no distinction in that, but rather somethicg 
which, to superficial minds, might seem to border 
upon the reverse. And so it was to the honor of 
the President that all along he clung to that ear- 
lier fellowship in which, in the first flush of his 
opening manhood, he had found his way into the 
enkindling fellowship of his Master and Saviour. 
In that humble communion there seem to have been 
good men who strongly influenced his childhood and 
youth alike. He never forgot them. He turned to 
them, all along, with deepening reverence and grati- 
tude, and his love for his Bible, his habit of getting 
wisdom and strength for each day's duties on his 
knees, which lie^ had earl}' learned of these men, 
these, too, he never forgot or outgrew. It is the vice 
of our American manhood that in matters of religion 
it is so often so furtive and secretive. We are 
ashamed to be seen reading a good book, and, most 
of all, to be seen reading the best book. A merchant 
who should keep a copy of the two Testaments at 
his elbow would be thought, by many people, a fa- 
natic or a Pharisee. And yet he would find better 
advice in either of them, often, than he would get 
from the most learned treatise on banking or the 
most profound disquisition on laws of exchange. 



28 

Has it ever occurred to us why there has been such 
rare earnestness and reality in all our praying for 
the President ? Though we have not been conscious 
of it, I am persuaded that it has been because, in the 
common heart and thought of the people, there has 
been the deep sub-consciousness that he for whom 
they were praying believed in prayer himself, and 
that while they were asking God to heal him, he 
himself was trying every hour to say, in the spirit 
of that Master who said it Himself, and who taught 
us all to say it, Not as I will, but as Thou wilt : Thy 
will be done ! 

{(■). And this brings me naturally and obviously 
to speak of that last trait in the leader whom we have 
lost, which, as I think, it belongs to us in this place 
pre-eminently to recall. It has been said that if the 
President had died on the day that he was shot down 
by the assassin's hand, the outburst of indignation 
would have been far fiercer, but that the feeling 
elicited would have been alike more ephemeral and 
more circumscribed. It is not difficult to see why. 
Never was there a nobler triumph of the grace of 
patience than in this man. There is a great deal that 
seemed trivial or insignificant at the time 
that it happened, which now, looking back on 
it, we can estimate at its true worth. The play- 
ful greeting with which he welcomed his friends 
to the sick-chamber, the cheery word or look, 
that at the time we took for tokens how much 
less grave was the emergency than we dreaded ; ah ! 
how different they all read now ! To bear pain is 
hard enough, and men who can be brave in danger, 
and can endure without a quiver some brief opera- 



2i9 

tion, are apt to break down very soon in those long 
stretches of suffering which women have oftener to 
bear than men, and which they bear usually so much 
better. But here was a sufferer whose patience and 
courage were co-equal. Remember what message 
he sent from his sick room to the wife who was 
hastening to his side : " The President is wounded — 
how seriously he cannot tell. He asks that you 
should come to him, and sends you his love." No 
note of panic — no half savage shriek of command — 
innate dignity, sweetness, self-control, tenderest 
thought for another. And so it was all along. When 
they lifted him into the car at Washington, some 
awkward hand jarred the stretcher against the 
door-way. A pang of intense pain flashed its brief 
signal across the face of the sufferer — how keen 
a sufferer we know, now that we have read the 
story of that pierced and shattered spine — but 
no more — no word of impatience or complaint. And 
later on, when the wasted invalid is lifted for a brief 
vision of the sea — fit symbol of that Avider ocean on 
which he was so soon to launch — as the passing sen- 
tinel, catching a glimpse of the President, straight- 
way salutes his commander-in-chief, the old instinct 
of courtesy carries the shadowy hand to the visor, 
and once more the brave and patient sufferer forgets 
himself. Ah! my brothers, this sweet and steady 
self-command! this tireless and heroic patience! — 
these were the noblest of all. We lift our eyes from 
that sick bed to the cross of One who was once 
wounded and who suffered for us all. And it is the 
same spectacle of patient and uncomplaining suffer- 
ing that at once wins and conqiiers us there ! To 



30 

do, that were indeed noble if there were nothing no- 
bler in life. But to bear, to lie still and patiently 
endure, that is grander still ! 

And so we thank God to-day for that good exam- 
ple of this His servant, who has finished a course 
so heroic. Fidelity in duty, faith in Christ, and pa- 
tience in suffering, surely these are the elements out 
of which the most lasting greatness is builded l 
Blessed, thrice blessed, oh land, whose king 
is the son of such nobilities as these. Kingly ver- 
ily he was who could j^rove his right to rule by 
gifts so royal as these ! Who shall say that they or 
he have done their glorious work ? As we stand to- 
day and look down into that open grave where 
to-morrow he is to be laid amid the tears and 
lamentations of fifty millions of people, who shall 
say that his kingly work is ended ? That vigorous- 
intellect, those generous sympathies, that patient 
courage, that simple and reverent faith — are all 
these forever hushed and stilled ? As the low-browed 
portal swings upon its hinges, does it open uponi 
nothing beyond ? " And I heard as it were the 
voice of a great midtitude, and as the voice of many 
waters, and as the sound of mighty thunderings, say- 
ing, Alleluia : for the Lord God omnipotent reign- 
eth ! And one answered me saying. What are these 
which are arrayed in white raiment, and whence 
come they ? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. 
And he said unto me, these are they which came out 
of great tribulation." The long fight is ended. The 
bitterness of death is passed. Standing some of them 
in low places and some of them in high ones, bearing 
their burden, doing their task, owning their Lord,. 



31 



they have toiled and striven and endured, and so have 
fallen asleep. And, therefore, tarrying but a little 
in their earthly resting places, they stand, at last, 
before the throne of God; they serve him day and 
night in his temple, and "He that sitteth on the 
throne shall dwell among them." No pang can touch 
them now. "They shall hunger no more; neither 
thirst any more ; neither shall the sunlight on them ; 
nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst 
of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them 
unto living fountains of waters ; and God shall wipe 
away all tears from their eyes." 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 785 782 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



ill llii 111 i'llll '*''"* lliiiliii""'' 
013 785 782 



HoUinger 
pH8.5 
Mill Run F3-1 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 785 782 



Hollinger 

pH8.5 

Mill Run F3-1955 



